alt Hacker NewsGoogle employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
Comments
I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
That's aweful, only senators should be allowed to do that!
Interesting to see that insider trading is considered illegal after all.
When will the white house insiders see the same fate?
Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.
If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Maybe there’s a chance he can get pardoned before 2029 lol
If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
- Paul Newman
Well at least if they were gambling they wouldn't be in danger of arrest.
A few more cases like this and people will go back to gambling
So are we going to regulate these things or what?
See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/how-prediction-markets...
If he had made less money doing it he probably would have gotten away with it.
So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
NSA employees must be the final boss of this kind of stuff.
Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-ceo-shayne-coplan-on...
polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.
So they hanged a nobody while the person who made even more with white house insider trading announcements by the president goes scotch free?
Meanwhile His Royal Highness is free to do as he please. Got even life time immunity deal as well
Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.
Anyone could have run the list of candidate names from the bets through google trends right?
How could this be insider trading? Polymarket has nothing to do with financial securities. A bet on Polymarket is like trading any other crypto asset.
Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.